this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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Thinking of buying a second hand Elite Desk small factor to throw Linux on. I'm worried about the HP firmware-bios thingy. Does it call home? Can I disable calling home somehow? Can it have access to my hard drive info ?

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[–] Dehydrated@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago

The UEFI firmware shouldn't connect to the internet at all. You can't rule it out entirely, but the threat is pretty small. Theoretically, it can access your hard drives, but again, it's very unlikely that your BIOS will exfiltrate your data and send it somewhere. If you want to be sure, use LUKS for full disk encryption.